GM586 Unit 10 Plant Turnaround Leadership Paper Example

From the Closure List to Second in the Network: A Unit 10 Applied Leadership Paper on a Glass Plant Turnaround

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM586: Transformational Leadership

Unit 10 Applied Leadership Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The glass container plant, its manager, its crews and every figure are composite and illustrative; the model and research cited are real.

The Problem

The plant makes glass bottles and jars for food and beverage customers and employs 310 people across four shifts. When the new manager, Tom Bekele, arrived from a sister plant, its pack-to-melt figure, the share of melted glass that leaves the plant as saleable containers, stood at about 82 percent, against a network average near 87 percent. Each point of pack-to-melt at a plant this size is worth roughly $1.4 million a year. The plant had been on the corporate closure review list for a year, and employees knew it.

I have been a quality engineer at the plant for nine years. My sources are transcripts of the quarterly all-hands meetings, which the plant records, the monthly plant newsletter, my own notes and the minutes of the furnace rebuild planning group, on which I served.

The Transactional Base Came First

The full range model holds that transformational leadership adds to transactional leadership and works best on top of it (Bass & Riggio, 2006). At this plant, the transactional base was built first, and the timing matters to the argument.

In his second week Bekele started a daily production meeting at 7:30, attended by the shift leads, maintenance, quality and the mold shop. Each forming line's pack-to-melt target for the day went on a whiteboard, with the previous day's result beside it. His rule was that any missed target got a stated cause and an owner within one shift. In the first three months, the meeting minutes show 214 missed targets, every one with a cause and an owner recorded. This was contingent reward and active management by exception, done consistently.

By month four, pack-to-melt had risen to about 84 percent, before any of the behaviors described below had appeared in the record. This early gain fits the meta-analytic evidence that contingent reward on its own is strongly tied to follower performance (Judge & Piccolo, 2004).

Inspirational Motivation: The Second All-Hands

At the second quarterly all-hands, in month six, Bekele named the closure list publicly for the first time. The transcript shows him saying that the plant would be off the list within two years if it reached 87 percent, and that it could reach 90 if the forming crews and the furnace crew worked as one plant. He then showed the crews' own daily results from the whiteboard. The newsletter that month carried the goal on its front page, and employees I spoke to remembered it as the first time a manager had talked about the closure list honestly.

Intellectual Stimulation: The Furnace Rebuild Planning

The plant's furnace needed a rebuild in year two. In earlier rebuilds, engineering had planned the work and told operations the schedule. Bekele asked a planning group of furnace operators, forming leads and engineers to design the rebuild sequence. The minutes show the operators proposing to rebuild in two stages, keeping one forming line running on a temporary melt, which engineering had considered impossible. The group tested the idea and adopted it, and the rebuild took 34 days instead of the planned 46.

Individualized Consideration: The Shift Leads

My notes record that Bekele met each of the 16 shift leads alone in his first year, asked what each wanted from the job, and arranged for three of them to train as process engineers. Two of those three now run forming lines. The newsletter carried short profiles of each shift lead over the year, written from those conversations.

The record shows the transactional base in place for four months before any transformational behavior appears, and the early gain came from that base alone.

Idealized Influence: The Night of the Furnace Leak

In year two, a furnace leak occurred on a Saturday night. Bekele came in, stayed through the repair, and at the next all-hands described his own mistake that night, a decision to delay shutting a line that cost an hour of production. Employees I spoke to mentioned the admission more often than the repair. His conduct set a standard: problems would be named, including his own.

The Outcomes

By the end of year three, pack-to-melt had reached about 89 percent, second among the network's twelve plants, and the plant was removed from the closure review list. A new forming machine was installed on one line in year two, and it explains part of the gain. That line's pack-to-melt rose about four points after installation, while the three older lines rose about five points over the three years without new equipment. The older lines' gains are the better evidence for leadership's contribution.

Jane Howell and Bruce Avolio found that transformational leadership predicted business unit performance a year later, which supports the idea that leadership can shape results over time (Howell & Avolio, 1993). The plant's record is consistent with that, though one plant cannot establish cause.

The Harm: The Mold Shop

In year three, corporate offered the plant a choice: outsource mold repair to a network supplier or lose capital for a second forming machine. Bekele chose to outsource. The mold shop's 14 machinists were offered transfers to other plants or severance. Nine took severance. The transcript of the all-hands where he announced it shows him praising the mold shop's work but offering no explanation of why their jobs, rather than others, were cut. No individual meetings with the machinists appear in my notes or the newsletter. Every other crew had received his individual attention; this one, facing the largest loss, did not.

Daan van Knippenberg and Sim Sitkin criticize the habit of treating transformational leadership as one combined quality, arguing that its separate behaviors should be examined one by one because a leader may show some and not others (van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013). The mold shop shows why the separation matters here. The same manager who built individualized consideration with the shift leads did not extend it to the crew he let go.

What the Model Explains and What It Misses

The full range model explains the turnaround well. The transactional base produced early gains, and the transformational behaviors built on it, each with its own evidence. The model does not explain the mold shop decision, which was a business trade-off forced by corporate. But it does explain how the decision was handled, and by the model's own standard, it was handled poorly. A leader who is transformational toward the people whose work he needs and transactional toward the people he is letting go is still a strong leader, but his record has a gap the model makes visible.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Howell, J. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1993). Transformational leadership, transactional leadership, locus of control, and support for innovation: Key predictors of consolidated-business-unit performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78(6), 891-902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.6.891

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

van Knippenberg, D., & Sitkin, S. B. (2013). A critical assessment of charismatic-transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 1-60. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2013.759433